Bitcoin Didn't Break. The $320M Shortcut Built on Top of It Did.

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Bitcoin Well

Bitcoin Didn't Break. The $320M Shortcut Built on Top of It Did.

The Revolution Is Next Tuesday: How a 1992 Email Predicted the Way Bitcoin Would Spread

On Sunday, just under 4,000 bitcoin left a wallet that needs 11 of 15 companies to agree before anything moves. Eleven agreed. That was the problem. Here is how it happened, without the jargon. Liquid is a side network run by Blockstream. You deposit real bitcoin, you get a token called L-BTC, and the token hides transaction amounts for privacy. The software that checks those hidden amounts had a bug. Someone used it to create L-BTC that no bitcoin had ever backed, then asked to cash the tokens out for the real thing. To the companies holding the real coins, the request looked legitimate, so it was signed, and about 4,000 BTC walked out to a new address with a note attached: "we are whitehats. contact us on chain." The bug had been there for more than two years. On Monday, after Blockstream patched it, 3,400 BTC came back. 598.5 BTC, about $47,000,000, did not. Call it a bounty or call it a ransom. Either way it was negotiated, because a committee can be negotiated with. Everyone holding L-BTC believed they held bitcoin. They held a promise from fifteen companies running one piece of software. That is not a Blockstream problem. It is what every layer built on top of Bitcoin is: a promise, with people in it. Bitcoin at an address only you can sign for has no committee to fool and nobody to negotiate with.

New money does not reach everyone at once. It reaches whoever is closest to the printer first, and by the time it reaches you, prices already know. Mises wrote that in 1912. It has not been refuted, only ignored. Bitcoin hands new coins to whoever did the work. Not to whoever knows the banker.

Labor Day question for our American readers: where is the 401(k) from the job you left? It's still there. Sitting in your old employer's plan, in a fund lineup somebody in HR picked, earning whatever the market hands it. You didn't choose those funds. You can't put bitcoin in them. An eligible 401(k) or IRA can be rolled over into a Bitcoin Well IRA, and rollovers don't have the annual cap contributions do. Money you already earned, moved into real bitcoin you can verify on-chain, inside the same tax-advantaged structure. Not advice. Eligibility depends on your plan and your situation. But the money is yours, and "I haven't thought about it in years" is not a plan. Launching this fall:

Happy Labour Day. Here is what a year of labour bought the average Canadian worker. Statistics Canada, Friday: average hourly wages up 2.0% over the year, to $37.02. Bank of Canada, Wednesday: prices "hovering around 3%." Paid more. Bought less. A raise and a pay cut in the same envelope, in the Bank's own numbers. You can negotiate your wage. You cannot negotiate the unit it is paid in. That gets decided at a meeting you were not invited to. Bitcoin is the one thing you can be paid in whose rules were fixed before you were hired.

On April 5, 1933, it became a federal crime for an American to hold their own gold. Executive Order 6102. Every person was ordered to deliver their gold coins, gold bars and gold certificates to a Federal Reserve bank by May 1. The government paid $20.67 an ounce. The penalty for keeping it: up to $10,000 in fines, up to ten years in prison, or both. (You were allowed to keep $100 worth. About five ounces.) The following January, the Gold Reserve Act reset the price to $35 an ounce. The same gold, now in government vaults, was worth 69% more. The people who handed it in got none of the difference. Nobody broke in. Nobody picked a lock. The confiscation was a form and a poster at the post office, and it worked because gold has to sit somewhere, and somewhere can be searched. The order's title didn't say confiscation. It said "hoarding." Your savings became hoarding the day the government wanted them. That is the whole case for money you can carry in your head. Twelve words, memorized, cannot be delivered to a Federal Reserve bank by May 1.

Saturday question, long-weekend edition. How many hours did you have to work to buy your first whole bitcoin? Not the price. The hours.

You've probably already bought bitcoin and put it in cold storage with income you already paid a tax on. Your retirement account is the biggest tax advantage most Americans will ever get, and for most of you it's the one place your plan won't let bitcoin in. We're fixing that. The Bitcoin Well IRA: real bitcoin, held in a Traditional or Roth IRA, with holdings you can verify on-chain. Not a share of a fund. Not "exposure." Actual coins at an address you can check. Straight about the structure: three separate companies, each doing one job. We source the bitcoin. Heritage IRA administers the account. BitGo holds the coins in qualified custody. That is not self-custody and we won't dress it up as self-custody. It is verified ownership, and the freedom to leave. Launching this fall. Get on the list:

The idea behind every bitcoin key you own was rejected as a homework assignment. Fall 1974. Ralph Merkle, an undergraduate at Berkeley, submits a project proposal for his computer security course: a way for two strangers to agree on a secret over a wire anyone can listen to. The professor turns it down. Merkle rewrites it shorter, resubmits, gets it back with notes in the margin, and drops the course. He keeps working on it anyway. In August 1975 he sends the paper to the Communications of the ACM. The anonymous reviewer's verdict: "not in the main stream of present cryptography thinking." It took almost three years to get published. By then the world had named it: public key cryptography. He wasn't done. In 1979 he worked out how to fold thousands of records into one fingerprint you can check in seconds. Bitcoin calls it the Merkle root. There is one in the header of every block. You see, the experts weren't lying. They were describing the mainstream, accurately. The mainstream was wrong. Bitcoin is built almost entirely out of ideas that were turned down first. That should make you more comfortable holding it, not less.

A Hard Month for Bitcoin Security, a Steady One for Bitcoin Well: Our August 2026 Update

Conbase @coinbase launched bitcoin trading in Canada yesterday. To use it you need $5,000,000 in financial assets, not counting your house. And you never receive a bitcoin. It is 23 contracts that pay out in dollars, with up to 10x borrowed money, run by Coinbase's US futures arm. Not one coin moves. You cannot withdraw a bitcoin from it because there are none in it. These contracts are a claim on Coinbase. A coin in your wallet is bitcoin. Only one of them can actually be yours.

Saylor Just Broke His Months-Long Bitcoin Buying Pause

X (formerly Twitter)

Bitcoin Well

Saylor Just Broke His Months-Long Bitcoin Buying Pause

Bitcoin Well's CEO: 'Your Bank Account Is a Surveillance Camera

X (formerly Twitter)

Bitcoin Well

Bitcoin Well's CEO: 'Your Bank Account Is a Surveillance Camera

At 9:45 AM ET on Wednesday the Bank of Canada announces what it is doing to the price of every Canadian's money. Nobody reading this gets a vote. At 3:00 PM the same day, four people spend 75 minutes on what a Canadian can do that does not require one. Adam O'Brien (@adamobrien), our CEO, and the most debanked man in Canada. Nathan (@theBTCmentor). Connor, a Canadian CPA. Katie of CitizenX (@PlanBpassport). Four pillars, all built for our situation. Saving in something whose supply is not set by a committee. The wealth management tools old money has used for a century, pointed at bitcoin. Self custody that still works when you cross a border. And what a second citizenship actually does for a Canadian passport holder. Three of the four hosts are Canadian citizens. This one is not a US webinar with our flag on it.

Nobody can tell you what those coin-splitting sites do. That is the point. On Sunday @ForrestHODL warned that scam sites were circulating around claiming BIP-110 and BLAKE2b coins, and said plainly not to put your information into any of them. On Monday, Bitcoin News posted a link to a coin-splitting portal, then deleted its own post and explained why: it had not audited the site or its software and would not point readers at code that could put their bitcoin at risk. Every one of these sites needs one of two things from you. Send bitcoin to an address it controls, or hand over your keys or seed. There is no third option, because there is no way to move coins on any chain without one of those. Both are the end of the conversation. And look at the trade you are being offered. Unknown upside on a coin with no established price, no verified splitting method, no wallet support you can check and no exchange that will take it, against the entire stack sitting behind those keys. Just wait. There is no deadline on this and nothing expires. The coins, if they are ever worth anything, will still be claimable when there is software people have actually reviewed. Forrest has good explainers for when that day comes. Right now the correct action is none.

The list is a weapon

Strive, of @ColeMacro, added 1,800 bitcoin last week and is now the fifth largest publicly traded company holding it. 23,156 coins. Fifth place. On the whole planet. Among every listed company there is. That is about one tenth of one percent of all the bitcoin that will ever exist. Strategy is the outlier up top at 845,050 coins, a little over 4%. Everyone else in the top five holds a fraction of a percent. Congratulations to the Strive team, genuinely. And for everyone reading it as a headline about institutions absorbing the supply: fifth place on this planet is a tenth of a percent. The field is far emptier than it sounds. Coins in a wallet you control put you on the same board they are on.

Gold just had its worst quarter since 2013. Tether bought 14 more tonnes into it. The pile now runs past 146 tonnes, roughly double what Australia's central bank holds. The largest issuer of digital dollars on earth spent a falling market accumulating the one money that has never had an issuer. You can read that as a trade or as a tell. Either way, the version of it available to you needs no vault, no attestation and no quarterly report from an accounting firm. Buy spot bitcoin and take it off the exchange yourself.

Somebody on X is paying strangers to stop trusting him. @JoelBomgar is sending $250 of his own bitcoin to Bitcoin educators who do not yet own a hardware wallet, so they can go and buy one. No affiliate link. Nothing of his to sell. Most of what passes for Bitcoin marketing is a company asking to hold your coins for you. Every so often you get the opposite, and it is worth naming when you see it.